The Tragic Story of Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger's Cat could not cope with a lifetime of uncertainty.

chrödinger's Cat played a critical role in
the early development of quantum mechanics. He is most well known for his
famous thought experiment, in which he postulated that a measurement made
by an observer could determine the outcome of a quantum event, using himself
as an example. His paper on the subject, “Mein gegenwärtige
Situation in der Quantenmechanik”, published in 1935 in the prestigious
journal Naturwissenschaften, established his reputation as a
first-rate theoretical physicist.

Schrodinger's Cat could not cope with a lifetime of uncertainty.
(Adapted from a photo from unknown source)

After this brief bit of fame, however, Schrödinger's cat soon fell
on hard times. The constant stress of never knowing from one moment to
the next whether he was still alive or dead began to take its toll.
One by one, his sources of funding dried up. Soon, he found that he
was no longer being invited to give seminars, and his scientific
colleagues and students expressed uncertainty about whether he would
show up at his lectures. Some people even debated whether he was
even still alive. Gradually, Schrödinger's cat began to drink, often
drinking himself into a catatonic stupor.

The insidious effects of chronic alcohol abuse began to affect his work.
This was especially evident in his last paper published shortly before
his death in 1961, “Der Maus Eigenfunctionen im Unendlich-dimensional
Hilbertraum”, in which he published the
following cryptic equation for analyzing the momentum of electrically-charged
particles:

p[[p[p[p = <~~fafafaf | 35eeeeeeeeee >

It has been speculated that if properly understood, this strange-looking
equation may have profound implications for our understanding of the
interactions of particles in an electromagnetic field. Unfortunately,
the original manuscript was covered with a green-colored stain that
resembled cat vomit.

His last work was in telecommunications. His invention of Cat-5
cable at Bell Laboratories laid the foundations for the Internet.
In his last days he also spent more and more of his time toying
with string theory.

In his later years, Schrödinger's cat also received an unfortunate
head injury that resulted in Yoda syndrome, named after the famous
speech-impaired character Yodapappankin from the movie Star Wars.
Although a CAT-scan produced an ambiguous (and in fact uninterpretable)
result, the accident had clearly affected his speech centers, and his book
“Um Gegenwärtige Quantenmechanik: Gesprache, Gedanken, und
Haarknäuel” contains sentences like “Larger for l=0 the
polarization effect of vacuum on the higher orbital angular momenta is,”
in which the word order is altered in a fashion characteristic of the
well-known dyslexia-like disorder. He frequently expressed despair
about his ability to communicate with his students.
“ Up your room, clean you must!” and
“Learn they will not, afraid I am,” he would often say, shaking his
head sadly and taking another swig of Black Cat Whisky. “Bad it is too.”
Because of this speech impediment, many of his students
were forced to drop his class on quantum mechanics. His earlier
obsession with mice and excessive use of catnip also came to
dominate his personality, and he was arrested several times for
lurking around the Institut für Labortierkunde at the Biologischen
Zentrallabor at the University of Zurich.